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Authors: Carol Ross Joynt
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Money management was not a particularly important part of my parents’ style. It was the postwar boom. Let the good times roll. Borrowing money was just what you did. I was too young to know what debt was, but I knew it followed us wherever we went. The money ups and downs, the travel, and the fluid living arrangements combined to make me, as a teenager, an expert at arriving in new neighborhoods and schools and quickly finding friends. Even when we moved to a home of our own near Mount Vernon and stayed for all four years of my high school, I didn’t entirely buy into the seeming stability. It always felt elusive. There was a lesson here, but I didn’t learn it.
I was fortunate to have had my parents much of my adult life. Olga died from lung cancer when I was thirty-seven, exactly ten years before Howard’s death. Hers was a quick and terrible decline, as so many cancer deaths are, especially with the adverse effects of radiation and other treatments. The family was at her bedside in the last days, and she died peacefully at home.
H OWARD APPEARED TO have had stability, money, and comfort from the start. He was born March 21, 1939, and came home to a historic house in Alexandria, Virginia, where he lived until he moved out as an adult. It was the Benjamin Dulany House, one of the finest in Old Town. The record shows that George Washington dined there. (He ate out a lot in that part of Virginia.) Howard’s parents, Howard and May, bought the house in 1932 and lived there until Mr. Joynt died in July 1989. May Joynt died less than a decade later, after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s. But through much of Howard’s life he had the apparent security of one home, with successful and cultured parents.
Life in the elegant Joynt household was lived as close to the 1750s model as one could reasonably get. Modern amenities, such as televisions, were tucked away out of sight. The silver was made by Paul Revere, William Hollingshead, and Jacob Hurd. The furniture was Chippendale, Queen Anne, and Federal from Philadelphia and Massachusetts. The paintings that hung on the drawing room and library walls were by Gilbert Stuart and John Singleton Copley, the prints by Audubon. The porcelain was Chinese export, Sèvres, or Delft, and the rugs were Aubusson. The floors, moldings, windows, and doors were original to the house. The boxwood garden was designed by a famed expert in eighteenth-century landscaping. Mr. Joynt made one concession to the early twentieth century. He ate his morning cereal from Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s breakfast bowl. It was all very lovely but, frankly, like living in a museum. For Howard, it was stifling.
I went from public high school straight to work. Howard went from school to freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania. I eventually learned that he embellished the stories of his past. Howard wasa bit of what the French call a
mythomane
. He told wonderful tales about himself and others whose faithfulness to the facts could fairly be described as problematic.
Odd that I point this out, given what happened, but I was more into facts. I really
liked
digging up details about things that had happened, and I was rigid about telling the truth. There’d been a lot of lying in my household growing up—about my parents’ debts, their drinking, their fights, and my sister. No doubt my veracity was at the root of my fondness for journalism. After high school I went from hometown newspaper to the Washington bureau of United Press International, where I started with an entry-level job that led to reporting on the antiwar movement. That got me front-page bylines all over the world as the protests rose in volume and intensity. It was a heady experience. I loved my work—and it seemed like only an incidental bonus that they were paying me to do it.
From UPI to
Time
magazine in New York, and then at twenty-two I landed the big prize—writing the
CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
.
I was fortunate to have had my parents much of my adult life. Olga died from lung cancer when I was thirty-seven, exactly ten years before Howard’s death. Hers was a quick and terrible decline, as so many cancer deaths are, especially with the adverse effects of radiation and other treatments. The family was at her bedside in the last days, and she died peacefully at home.
H OWARD APPEARED TO have had stability, money, and comfort from the start. He was born March 21, 1939, and came home to a historic house in Alexandria, Virginia, where he lived until he moved out as an adult. It was the Benjamin Dulany House, one of the finest in Old Town. The record shows that George Washington dined there. (He ate out a lot in that part of Virginia.) Howard’s parents, Howard and May, bought the house in 1932 and lived there until Mr. Joynt died in July 1989. May Joynt died less than a decade later, after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s. But through much of Howard’s life he had the apparent security of one home, with successful and cultured parents.
Life in the elegant Joynt household was lived as close to the 1750s model as one could reasonably get. Modern amenities, such as televisions, were tucked away out of sight. The silver was made by Paul Revere, William Hollingshead, and Jacob Hurd. The furniture was Chippendale, Queen Anne, and Federal from Philadelphia and Massachusetts. The paintings that hung on the drawing room and library walls were by Gilbert Stuart and John Singleton Copley, the prints by Audubon. The porcelain was Chinese export, Sèvres, or Delft, and the rugs were Aubusson. The floors, moldings, windows, and doors were original to the house. The boxwood garden was designed by a famed expert in eighteenth-century landscaping. Mr. Joynt made one concession to the early twentieth century. He ate his morning cereal from Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s breakfast bowl. It was all very lovely but, frankly, like living in a museum. For Howard, it was stifling.
I went from public high school straight to work. Howard went from school to freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania. I eventually learned that he embellished the stories of his past. Howard wasa bit of what the French call a
mythomane
. He told wonderful tales about himself and others whose faithfulness to the facts could fairly be described as problematic.
Odd that I point this out, given what happened, but I was more into facts. I really
liked
digging up details about things that had happened, and I was rigid about telling the truth. There’d been a lot of lying in my household growing up—about my parents’ debts, their drinking, their fights, and my sister. No doubt my veracity was at the root of my fondness for journalism. After high school I went from hometown newspaper to the Washington bureau of United Press International, where I started with an entry-level job that led to reporting on the antiwar movement. That got me front-page bylines all over the world as the protests rose in volume and intensity. It was a heady experience. I loved my work—and it seemed like only an incidental bonus that they were paying me to do it.
From UPI to
Time
magazine in New York, and then at twenty-two I landed the big prize—writing the
CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
.
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